Cloak Dagger/Headline Records

This last weekend I trekked down to the ever-wonderful city of Los Angeles, California with some friends; good times were had and lots of money that I didn’t have was spent. Most of said spending was done at Headline Records in Hollywood on Melrose Ave. This place is awesome and I could—and did—spend many hours in this record nerd's oasis. Headline Records is mostly a punk/hardcore record store but has some other related genres to choose from.
I bought a lot of good records at Headline, but keeping true to this blog's format I will only talk about the cheap ones, which, in this case, happens to be the Cloak Dagger seven-inch entitled “Piñata” released on Grave Mistake Records. I found this bad boy for around three bucks on white vinyl and I was psyched. This band has ex members from many prominent bands in the hardcore scene such as Striking Distance, Barfight, and Count Me Out etc. but manages to sound nothing like any of those bands. Cloak Dagger brings to mind early punk like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks but with catchier riffs and awesome hooks; definitely a quality buy.
The first time I heard Cloak Dagger was when my roommate gave me the mp3s he had of the seven inch. The notion that someone was able to digitally receive music for free and then still go out and buy the actual record would probably make a major label record executive’s head explode in disbelief, but it happens. Many major record labels are so afraid of music being shared or copyrights infringed upon their product that they have implemented DRM—Digital Rights Management—software in order to disallow music from playing on different mediums as well . I think the mindset that these major labels and corporations are taking is completely skewed and unrealistic. Music has been shared for many years and implementing technologies that hinder rights that people should be granted under fair use—like being able to play a purchased mp3 on more than one source—seems crazy. Besides, there are always ways to circumvent these crazy technologies; within the first page of youtube there are video tutorials to crack DRM protected files. Here’s a funny video illustrating the progression of recorded music to today: DRM video


And here's a video of Count Me Out.